


Extreme circumstances

by Kes



Series: Thor 2 Rewritten: The Shaded Tree [13]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-29
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-04 05:35:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2954165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kes/pseuds/Kes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Back on Earth, Darcy and Ian finally track down Erik and discover that the fate of the world itself could be at stake. With no sign of Jane and a situation in which any interference in their work could destroy it entirely, it's down to them to step forward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Extreme circumstances

Finding Erik’s address has been even more tedious than Darcy feared. Perhaps it’s just as well he hasn’t contacted them – the only thing in her email inbox is a tentative attempt at getting in touch with Jane from her mom – because if it had turned out that her long hours dodging SHIELD security hadn’t been necessary, she might have screamed. She says as much to Ian as she bangs out a hopefully-appropriate reply to Pauline Foster.

“You did scream, like, five times,” he points out.

“Only when it turned out the university address was a dud! And – shut up,” she says, and grins. She is not going to be self-conscious about her victory dance.

“What do we take?”

“I’m not lugging Jane’s whole laboratory around London. Take the folder with the dimensional field monitor results print-outs and the one labelled Erik.”

“The one that says ‘Ian don’t look’?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

They haven’t spoken much since she started digging. Her eyes are itching from the computer glow and she barely remembers what he did in the meantime – though the smell from the kitchen gives her one clue. “Did you get take-out?”

“Yeah. I got enough for both of us and put it on the expenses sheet.”

Before he has even finished talking, she’s in the kitchen and nearly inhaling cold pizza. “You know, back when I was an intern, this was my job,” she says around it. “You have the Darcy Lewis stamp of approval as a successor.”

Apparently the statement isn’t worthy of a reply, but he does come and stand in the kitchen doorway, tossing his keys from hand to hand. “What’s Dr Selvig like?” he asks eventually.

It’s been a couple of years – come to think of it, she hasn’t seen him face to face since New Mexico and the frantic months that followed. “He’s clever. I didn’t like him when I met him because, you know how it is when you know someone knows the thing you’re doing better than you, and you can feel they know it? Like that. I don’t know whether I was misinterpreting, but he was okay after the – stuff that happened to set us off on this thread of research. Jane thinks he’s great and Thor seemed to like him. She’s worried about him now, apparently he doesn’t sound like himself and hasn’t since New York.” Darcy shrugs. Weird magical coercion into being complicit in an invasion by aliens seems like the kind of thing that would mess you up a bit.

Thinking about that brings her mind back to Jane and whatever she picked up beyond the portal. _Come back, Jane._

-

Erik lives just over an hour’s drive away, in a small house shielded by a massive hedge. “This must be costing him an arm and a leg,” Ian says, shoving his phone back into his pocket and looking up at it.

“Hopefully not literally,” she replies, and looks around. If it’s under SHIELD guard, they might want to think twice before getting out of the car. Nothing she can see. “Well, let’s go.” She lets him go through the gate into the garden first, as the less familiar face, but no-one jumps out and points guns at them. _Did I really think they would?_

At the door, Ian hangs back. “He knows you,” he points out, and she squints at him; he’s nervous. Instead of pointing it out, she knocks.

It takes three volleys of knocking to get a response. Erik yanks the door inwards, scowling, and starts to ask who the hell they are before he recognises her. “Darcy! It’s good to see you.”

“You too – um, Erik? Your pants?”

His face crumbles as abruptly as it had cleared. “I’m so sorry – this keeps happening –” he says and hurriedly retreats.

“Shall I come in?” she calls after him, through the open door.

“Yes, yes. I’ll be there in a moment.”

Ian is still looking everywhere but the doorway. “Come on.”

“I’m guessing he wasn’t like this when you knew him?” he asks in a whisper when they reach Erik’s living room, where the only place to sit is a tiny area on the rim of a windowseat. Everything else is covered in scientific papers, diagrams, charts… some of it she understands, but most of it is as beyond her as whatever alchemy Jane uses in her brain to fuse all the data they produce into a coherent whole.

She looks around for bugs – whatever. SHIELD can deal with this much. “Bad stuff happened to him in New York. No-one told us much, just that there was magical coercion happening.”

Ian grimaces. “Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

It takes far longer than she expected, but eventually Erik gets downstairs, fully dressed. “It’s been happening since New York,” he says, though he doesn’t face her head on. “I get… fixated on something and I forget there’s things I need to do along the way.”

“And we dropped by out of nowhere. Don’t worry about it.” She plans to very firmly put it out of her mind. “Look, we’ve been trying to get in touch with you for weeks now, Jane came to London because you said you had really important data she needed to get involved with.” He looks thinner than he had before, she notices.

“Was that by phone?” he asks.

Ian seems to have left the conversation to stare at a chart atop a teetering pile of books, his mouth moving in reverent calculations.

“…and email.”

“The phone kept distracting me and I threw it away,” Erik says, his fingers curling. “I forgot I’d called Jane over. Where is she?”

“That’s the problem.” Darcy launches into an explanation of the current situation. A few moments in, he finds a notebook from somewhere within the chaos and starts scribbling.

When she’s done, he is quiet for a few moments, and then places the book with a quick sketch of the Nine Realms on a table. “Come and look. This is the model the Foster Theory postulates, of the nine worlds linked to each other by a cosmological web, which Jane calls Yggdrasill. It’s detectable from our skies, but it’s usually very faint. What I discovered is that here, now, it’s much stronger. That’s what you’ve been seeing. It’s strong and it’s getting stronger. I did the calculations – I wanted Jane’s independent version of them, but it’s too late for that now – and discovered that the worlds are moving towards each other and will align soon. I call it the Converging. The worlds come closer and their particular space-time environments touch, and if it happens to us now, it could be catastrophic. Gravitational anomalies are only the beginnning – light, even matter will pass between the worlds.”

“Shit,” Ian says, while Erik pauses for breath and turns the page to a printout of a few graphs.

“This is how I think it will go. What I’ve been doing since I figured this out is making gravometric spikes. Placed around the focal point of the Converging – it’s in south England, but I haven’t pinpointed it yet – they will stabilise the gravitational effects so that all the other worlds just pass us by. I hope. It’s difficult to run accurate tests for these things, I was hoping Jane might have data I could run simulations with.”

“Right,” she says, her eyes flicking over the graphs – “Ian. Does that look – does this look anything like the graph view of our data to you?”

“The readings from the dimensional field monitor?” From over their shoulders, Ian peers at the page and then flicks through the folder he’s still clutching in his hands.

The early stages are identical. “It’s happening. Sooner than I calculated,” Erik breathes, his knuckles white around his pencil.

Darcy takes a deep breath, and another. _I am not being paid enough for this._ But is anyone? Whose job even is this? Apparently it’s not a priority for SHIELD, since they haven’t come busting down the door and stealing all their equipment – at least, she hopes they haven’t.

Slowly Erik places the two snapped halves of the pencil on the table. “When will Jane be back?”

“We don’t know,” Ian answers.

“Hopefully soon.” She doesn’t voice the fear that has been slowly creeping into the back of her mind ever since she’d caught some of Jane and Thor’s conversation in the warehouse parking lot. “But we can’t rely on it being in time, so… I guess we just have to go for it.”

“Does Jane have a lab here? What’s in it?”

Ian reels off the equipment they have in their working area, which can only be called a lab in the broad sense of the term, as well as in the workshop that Jane still maintains in case she needs to cobble something together on the fly, and the operation starts to get underway. Apparently Erik’s work is more portable, so they start to pack armfuls of paper, unwieldy pieces of incomprehensible machinery, hard drives, notebooks, books and toolkits into the car. By the time they are done, Erik is sitting in the back seat with the gravometric spikes on his lap so that they don’t get jostled, Ian can barely move his legs for everything packed around him, and Darcy, while she has nothing impeding her movement, can only just see properly out of the mirror.

“Be careful,” Erik says as she manoeuvres out of the parking space. “If the Converging is this close, strange things will already be happening.”

“I got that two days ago,” she snaps back, and drives off.

After a few moments Ian disentangles a hand and turns on the radio.

_“…Helen Dalmer, lead technician, attributed the mysterious disappearance and relocation of a flock of starlings –”_

“Murmuration,” Ian mutters. “It’s a murmuration.”

_“– to a fault in the transmission equipment, causing a visual glitch. Unfortunately, we have not been able to verify either possibility –”_

He snaps it off. “Well,” Darcy says. “I’m going to drive a bit faster.”

“We should warn people. Get the word out.”

“Yeah, because phoning the BBC and telling them that the Nine Worlds are going to come knocking on our skies at some point relatively soon is going to be so easily believed. Most people still think the Foster Theory’s guff, even though it got proved demonstrably right, and then New York happened.”

Erik makes a snorting sound and grimaces. “Besides, would anyone believe me after… that?”

“We just did.”

“You work in my field.”

“And there’s the secrecy agreement,” she adds.

“Is there anything in it about extreme circumstances?”

By the time they’ve carted everything in from the car and started to settle it in, everyone is feeling about thirty times more stressed than they were an hour previously, and they still have no agreement. “I am so not paid enough for this!” Darcy snaps, eventually. At least they have conclusive proof SHIELD hasn’t been able to bug them? “If we try to warn people, either They That Must Not Be Named are gonna come down on our asses for breaking the agreement, or they’ll try to take it out of our hands, or someone will see it as a terrorist threat and shut us down, or, or, or – and if we don’t, then –”

Suddenly she realises the shade of Erik’s face, a grey-tinged white.

“Hey, are you okay?”

“I can’t think like this. I need to get on with the spikes and I can’t think through this.”

They’re both looking at her to make the decision, she realises – whatever decision they need making. It makes sense. If Erik had thought of this, he would have done it already, and Ian... might not even know enough. Darcy gulps. _I did not sign up for superheroics – I’m not old enough for this, I’m not –_ “Right. Erik, you get on with that, I guess – I know where things are, tell me what you need. Ian, we’ll lie about what you know later, try and find out more about where it’s gonna happen. I’m gonna try and warn people in a way that they can’t come and take it off us.”

It’s a hard ask, but saving the world probably always is. _Wonder if they’ll make me an Avenger for this._ It’s not really an Avengers sort of battle, though – what would Captain America do, punch a gravitational anomaly, make a patriotic speech and get swarmed by angry English people? Maybe it’s their sort of battle, a scientists’ sort of battle, and with Jane gone there’s only them.

“Where’s Jane’s New Mexico data?” Erik says behind her. “That woman’s a genius, but she needs to sort out her filing systems.”

“You mean I need to sort out her filing systems. The blue hard drive is where the working folder is, plug in the red spotty one and back up to that as you go.”


End file.
